Operating unmanned aerial vehicles (or drones) has become a popular hobby. One particular area that has increased in popularity is racing using camera-equipped drones. In particular, drone racing can be used in combination with live video feeds (i.e., watched using video headsets) from the camera-equipped drones to provide a first-person view racing experience. A first-person video feed from the drone allows for an immersive racing experience.
Drones are controlled remotely by a pilot. To provide an enjoyable first-person racing experience, the video feed from the drone should be transmitted with low-latency. Low-latency ensures that a drone pilot can react quickly to the racing environment. Many racing drones use an analog video feed from the drone to a ground controller (or headset goggles) in order to achieve the lowest delay possible.
Many drone racers enjoy storing high-quality videos of drone races for later viewing. Generating high-quality videos increases latency, which may be unsuitable for a live feed used by the pilot to control the drone. A typical racing drone setup would have high-quality video (i.e., 720p, 1080p resolution) encoded and stored on a local storage device, and then a live view analog video feed sent directly through a radio-frequency (RF) channel to the ground controller.
The live view analog video feed is created in an effort to avoid incurring the encoding delay in the live view stream. However, racing drones can fly fast and can travel in various directions. Without the encoding used for the high-quality videos, image stabilization is not performed on the live view. Major drawbacks of using a live view analog video feed approach are that the video is very jerky, has rolling shutter artifacts, and is not stabilized.
It would be desirable to implement an electronic image stabilization of a low-latency video stream in a flying camera.